This is going to be a quick article today. My wife is away meeting up with her active duty and veteran peers on their annual Veteran’s Day meet-up. It’s actually the second weekend in a row where she’s been traveling and meeting with her veteran friends. With the kids out of school yesterday, I’ve been in full-time SAHD-mode for a few days.

I think it’s common knowledge that when you are sued, your lawyers are quick to suggest that you don’t say anything. It’s kind of like that part of the Miranda Raights where they say, “Anything you say will be used against you in a court of law.” It’s been extraordinary difficult because this blog is about my life’s journey. I should be able to share one of the most interesting things in my life, right?

With that understanding, I want to share some information of what other people have written. [Note: All my words on this article is my opinion and the other people’s words are up to them and their lawyers.]

First, for more information on RainSoft, I defer to this local news affiliate’s “Scam Busters” segment:

The First Amendment speaks to the sometimes-conflicting impulses of liberty and equality, ensuring the ‘breathing space,’ NAACP v. Button, 371 U.S. 415, 433 (1963), necessary for debate that is ‘uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,’ Sullivan, 376 U.S. at 270: it protects us while we freely discuss how we should live and love, how to wage war and keep peace, how best to govern ourselves. And equally, or almost, how to filter tap water on a budget. For this reason, and those above, summary judgment is GRANTED [to Lazy Man] on all counts.
IT IS SO ORDERED.

(I added the emphasis.)

I won!

So you might think that after the hundreds and hundreds of hours that I estimate I’ve spent on this would finally be over. You might also think that I (or you, or anyone) would have the freedom to write about “how to filter tap water on a budget.”

We previously reported on a ruling out of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida finding Home Depot and RainSoft’s collaborative use of in-home water testing was sufficient to support allegations of deceptive and unfair conduct.

… RainSoft has started legally targeting private citizens who speak out about it.

I’m that private citizen in case you couldn’t guess.

RainSoft has now filed a notice of appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit which means Brian will almost certainly have to continue spending significant sums of money on lawyers to fight RainSoft’s legal bullying. Tactics such as those employed by RainSoft against a private citizen simply for speaking his mind about their deceptive marketing practices are unfortunate and disheartening. Due to his efforts, however, word is spreading about the limited and misleading nature of in-home water tests as indicated by the numerous comments to his blog.

The law-firm also points out that I do have a GoFundMe here, which is indeed true. (I originally wrote the GoFundMe for a different lawsuit from the MLM company Le-Vel which I also won.)

I hope you had a good Veteran’s Day weekend. My wife had says she’s had some (much needed in my opinion) rest and relaxation. For me, it was good to put down the computer and spend some of those lost hours with the boys.

[Note 1: If I misinterpreted any legalese in this post, please keep in mind I’m not a lawyer. I always strive to put the best, most accurate description out there.

Note 2: The law-firm’s article makes a few mistakes that I feel may be factually important. The term, “magic show” was my wife’s description of the sales presentation. They were not my words. Also, my wife mailed in the sample. My wife was contacted by a “RainSoft-affiliated representative” who informed my wife that the test results weren’t up to par. (I wasn’t part of the conversation, so I don’t know the exact wording.) My wife booked the in-home water test, which I would characterize as a sales presentation. I was simply there because I work from home.]

[Editor’s Note: This article is written by Kosmo, our staff writer. If you didn’t know me better, you might think I’d apply this to some other financial fraud that I often write about, but I won’t do that.]

By now, almost everyone has heard of Pizzagate. If not, here is it is in a nutshell. Someone spun up an incredible tale that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were running a child sex-trafficking run out of pizza restaurants in the DC area. People noticed that the owner of one pizza joint had corresponded with Podesta in emails leaked by Wikileak (the restaurant owner had held some fundraisers for Hillary, hence the emails). Even more damning, the emails contained words like “pizza”, which were obvious code words for pedophilia (alternate theory: it’s a code word for “pizza”). Even in the universe of conspiracy theories, it’s pushing the envelope of credulity. Even if you believe that Hillary would be running a pedophilia ring, why would she run it out of locations that are very visible to the public? In the words of Bill Engvall, here’s your sign.

In early November, that restaurant began being targeted by conspiracy theorists, including death threats that arrived via text, Facebook, and Twitter. On December 4, a man from North Carolina walked into the restaurant with an AR-15 and fired shots. He was there to “self-investigate” the claims, since law enforcement was obviously involved in a cover-up.

Clearly, these types of conspiracy theories present a very real danger to the public – someone could easily have been seriously injured or killed as the result of a theory that was simply created out of thin air.

I believe there is also a more subtle secondary impact. Conspiracy theories allow financial fraudsters to more easily target victims. In the past, the most naïve among us had their naïveté shrouded in a cloud of relatively anonymity. Unless you interacted with a person on a fairly regular basis, you might not realize how gullible a person was. As a result, you might know who the most gullible people in your immediate social circle were, but you wouldn’t be able to pick them out of your broader circle.

The internet has changed that. I’m friends with 355 people on Facebook. Some of them I know very well; some of them I know more casually. I can scroll down my feed and look for friends/acquaintances who are sharing bizarre conspiracy theories today and make a list of names. A few days from now, I can repeat the practice. After several iterations, I can compare notes and find the names that pop up repeatedly. These are the people with a high gullibility index. If I wanted to run a Nigerian Price scheme, these would be the people I would target. Instead of casting a broad net, I could target people who had shown an inclination to believe utter [Editor’s note: bovine poop] and probably have a much higher success rate with my scams.

Naturally, I’m not actually going to do this. While I won’t claim to be a saint, my moral compass isn’t far enough askew to commit financial fraud. However, I am quite sure that there are people who would do this. In fact, I would expect professional fraudsters to start spinning up conspiracy theories for the sole purpose of serving as bait – assuming that they aren’t already doing this. They’ll set a theory loose into the wild and then track the people who share it. The moral of the story – use your critical thinking skills before sharing something. If it sounds too crazy to be true, the most likely explanation is that it simply isn’t true.

If the title wasn’t clear enough, I’m feeling surly today. A couple of years ago, I talked with a couple of British personal finance bloggers and I loved the way they casually would say sentences like in title and make it seem normal. This is a family blog, so for today, I’m going to borrow some British language to express how I feel.

[Yes, part of the reason why I’m surly is that Le-Vel is suing me for this review. I go out of my way to help consumers make informed choices and they through a frivolous lawsuit at me. That’s a topic for another day.]

I’ve been saving this article for a couple of months now.

There’s a battle going on in the world of solar energy. Even if you don’t have a dog in this fight, I think it is a very interesting debate. Let me set the table so we can get started.

When you have solar panels installed they produce power during the day when the sun is out and not at night. (Yes, this is really basic stuff.) People, however, use power round the clock. You can buy a battery to store the excess energy during the day to use at night. Unfortunately these are expensive and still not very efficient.

The solution to the problem has been something called “net metering.” This means that as your panels produce power it moves the electricity meter backwards as you “sell” power back to the grid. At night, the meter moves forward as you use electricity. So you only pay the electric company for the “net” amount that you use when the production is subtracted.

And this “net metering” solution made everyone happy… until it didn’t.

It turns out that the electric company can’t easily take this produced power and just move it to the next house. There’s a some grid infrastructure stuff that needs to happen. It wasn’t a big deal for a long time because few people had solar. Now that more and more people are getting solar power, include families like ours (read our solar journey), it becomes a big deal.

It’s become enough of a big deal in Nevada, that the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), changed the net metering rules. Instead of being able to “sell” back excess power at an equivalent rate, they’re only going to buy it back for 25 cents on the dollar.

The economics of going solar are fairly straight-forward. People put up an initial investment of tens of thousands of dollars based on analysis that it will save them money in the long run while helping the environment. When we bought our solar panels the math was pretty clear that they’d pay for themselves in year 7 or 8 and after that we’d be saving money.

The federal government encourages people to switch to solar by offering them a 30% tax credit. My state had grants to further lower the cost. The message that I was being sent by both levels of government was pretty clear, “We want consumers to adopt this technology so much we are going to cover half the cost ourselves.”

If my state were to institute the same net metering math of Nevada the panels we bought would break even probably sometime after their 25-year life expectancy passed. We, like most people, made the buying decision based on a hundred factors (such as location of roof, trees blocking the roof, typical sun, cost of local energy, etc.) none of which anticipated a net metering change.

In order to qualify for the state grant, the power company had to tour my home and make sure that we weren’t going to waste the power by using our energy inefficiently (old light bulbs, refrigerators, etc.). I don’t know if Nevada offers (or offered) state grants. At a minimum they should have had a similar process of meeting with the customer and telling them the risk of changing the net metering agreement. As best I can tell this never happened.

Maybe the power companies were blindsided by the problem, but now they are passing it onto consumers. As SolarCity said in the article above, “The Nevada government encouraged these people to go solar, and now the government is putting them at great financial risk.”

That article makes the point that, “The PUC staff has said customers generally understand that utility rates are subject to change, and the state never promised unchanging prices, even if solar companies did during the sales process.”

This is why the Nevada PUC should get stuffed. Everyone expects prices of electricity to change. That’s one of the main reasons why people choose solar. By producing electricity through solar, the cost is zero due to the initial outlay. When the cost of electricity goes up, the value of the power by the solar panels should go up too. This isn’t Nevada changing utility rates. This is changing a core policy. I wonder if the Nevada PUC highlighted this risk when the net metering was entered into. If it was, you’d think they would have said, “We informed all customers entering a net metering agreement that the rates at which you ‘sell’ energy back to us can change to whatever we see fit.”

Imagine if the government next year passes some kind of legislation that amounts to them saying, “We are going to tax all Roth IRA withdrawals at 75%. We don’t expect this to be an issue because the American public generally understands that tax rates change.”

Assuming that the typical Lazy Man and Money reader has been putting money in Roth IRAs for years, I think we’d be pretty upset. I think that’s probably what the solar customers of Nevada must be feeling right now.

And while this article has focused on Nevada, it isn’t just happening in Nevada. Many states have this issue of infrastructure expenses. The result of Nevada’s action has lead to a potential federal law to protect those who have already bought from such changes.

The other hope is that the batteries get better. Tesla has introduced a product it calls the Tesla Powerwall, which has a lot of potential.

I don’t know where all this is going to end up, but as Terrell Owens used to say, “Getcha popcorn, ready!”

This article should be required reading by every student… every year. Non-students should be required to read it too.

I’ll give you time to read it now. Got it? Good.

For the few people who still didn’t take the time to read it, it is exactly what the title says it is.

A journalist decided to see if he could fool millions of people with bunk science and he did. Here’s how:

1) He created a fake “institution” that sounded credible. He’s also a doctor, but not a medical doctor as most people assume when they think doctor.
2) He ran a clinical trial on a small number of people testing for a lot of different things… essentially throwing poop at the wall to see what sticks. Statistically a few things are always going to stick.
3) He found a bunch of journals that sounded professional. They are known to publish anything plausible with almost no questions as long as they are being paid.
4) He cooked up a juicy press releasing the “results.”
5) A bunch of magazines and news shows took the bait and rushed to highlight those great “results.”

I bet there are millions people who today think that eating chocolate helps you lose weight.

The takeaway from the journalist himself:

We journalists have to feed the daily news beast, and diet science is our horn of plenty. Readers just can’t get enough stories about the benefits of red wine or the dangers of fructose. Not only is it universally relevant — it pertains to decisions we all make at least three times a day — but it’s science! We don’t even have to leave home to do any reporting. We just dip our cups into the daily stream of scientific press releases flowing through our inboxes. Tack on a snappy stock photo and you’re done.

If there was a silver lining it was this: “… many readers were thoughtful and skeptical. In the online comments, they posed questions that the reporters should have asked.”

I’m often asked why I cover MLM scams so much. One of the reasons is that this kind of junk science is used to push the pyramid scheme and get people to pay so much more than they should. Here are a few examples:

MonaVie – The first time I encountered clear junk science was this “study.” It used 5 people and essentially concluded nothing helpful. It was also conducted by a doctor who was employed as MonaVie’s “Chief Science Officer.”

Xocai – This company produced a study that would lead you to believe that their chocolate helps you lose weight. I’m not making this up. They had 50 people which is at least a little more. They gave them lifestyle intervention which included many things including financial rewards for people who lost the most weight. Of course they also gave them a high antioxidant chocolate drink. There was no control variable and the conclusion was that all the stuff together works.

Of course we already know that financial incentives help people lose weight. They could have added watching an episode of Seinfeld to the study and conclude that Seinfeld helps you lose weight too. Brainwashed Xocai people actually presented this to me as scientific proof that consumers should buy their chocolate.

Nerium – As one commenter pointed out via Nerium’s study: “This will NEVER be published by a respectable journal it is so flawed. No P-value is listed. They don’t say what kind of blinded study it is and the bias is so obnoxious it is embarrassing. No self respecting company with ‘real science’ would ever put this out. Show me a triple blinded study with over 1,000 subjects in a multiple center design, with a P-value under .05%. Have the results measured with a cutometer or a corneometer. Then have it published in the JDD, the JAAD or any other reputable Dermatology Journal. Until then don’t believe any ‘study’ they put out.”

The company conducting the study claims that they “help build a strong, science-based, product portfolio”, which is exactly what it seems they did. The study was approved for publishing by someone who worked at the same place as one of Nerium’s employees and author of the study.

You can usually go through each of the MLMs and see the “doctor” (or Chief Science Officer) who is compensated handsomely to assert that the products “work.”

Ocean Spray doesn’t need a doctor to sell its juice like MonaVie. Hershey’s doesn’t need a doctor to sell it’s chocolate like Xocai.

Kudos to io9 for publishing this article and telling the story about how can be tricked. Now if only mainstream organizations would shine a light on some of the companies that are using the same tactics to trick consumers every day. Unfortunately, it takes a more work than just “dipping their cups into the daily stream of scientific press releases.”

Normally, I’d have my holiday gift guide ready for readers today. However, I’ve been sucked into drama on my “Is Home Depot’s Water Test from RainSoft a Scam?” article from almost 18 months ago. If you stick through this, I’ll give you details on a great, unrelated deal that’s 65% off of what I personally paid for the service… (or you can just scroll to the bottom, I’ll never know the difference.)

Regular readers know that I often write about multi-level marketing (MLM) and the scams there, but this non-MLM topic has exploded to almost 150 comments now. In at least three cases, I’ve had RainSoft dealers comment and leave a review of how wonderful their system is.

I asserted my logical opinion that the comment from the suspected RainSoft dealer was indeed the John Petrich of that LinkedIn profile. The commenter went crazy, saying that I was “way off” and “an internet stalker.” A few hours later a John Petrich emailed me saying that he’s getting email on his LinkedIn profile and he’s going to sue me for defamation because he’s not the same John Petrich who left the comment. That’s been going back and forth and the RainSoft debate rages on.

Catching people up on the RainSoft debate

My RainSoft article is long, but tells the story of how we signed up for a free water test at Home Depot and instead of getting water analysis as you might receive from your city or county, we received an in-home demonstration, a “magic show” according to my wife, of RainSoft’s EC-4 purifier. We were told it would be a half hour long, but it went on for 3-4 hours. It was filled with fear-inducing stories about the danger of chlorine. It went on about how much money we’d save vs. buying bottled water.

In the end, we were told we could buy a system for $4888 that would purify our water. We could spend another $1200 on a reverse osmosis machine for the drinking water in our kitchen sink. They were happy to let us finance this purchase at 17% interest, essentially like a credit card.

The representative offered to “throw-in” $2700 worth of soap, detergents, etc. Though he wouldn’t say what brand it was and I’m guessing it is an inflated price for some no-name soap that people don’t typically buy.

Then they topped it off by cashing a $100 deposit that they said they’d hold on to while we decided. I probably shouldn’t have given the money in the first place, but I wanted to buy time to research and this deposit held the soap offer, which is normally only available if you buy the same day. After a fight with the independent dealer and reporting them to Home Depot, RainSoft corporate saw my article and offered to give me the $100 deposit back.

It seems that other commenters have had the same experience with the “magic show” based on the dozens of comments.

RainSoft’s Assurance Guarantee

The latest thing that RainSoft dealers are pushing is their Assurance Guarantee. This guarantee says that if a RainSoft customer finds the same or better performing product at a better price in 30 days the RainSoft product will be free. Here is the text of that from a RainSoft Dealer. There’s no real fine print that I could see and the terms are ambiguous enough to have multiple interpretations.

The problem is that you have to validate it is better and I’m sure that RainSoft is going to challenge your validation. They may find one contaminant in a list of a hundred that wasn’t done as well and say, “Sorry, but our product performed better here, so the product you bringing to the table is inferior… no free RainSoft for you. Next!”

Additionally, according to the text, you can’t put together a couple of systems like I illustrate below, which would cost 1/5th what RainSoft is charging. That’s not one brand’s product, and they have different warranties.

It is almost like trying to prove that Babe Ruth is the best baseball player of all time. It may seem obvious to some, but worded as RainSoft does, they’d be free to say, “Umm, Vince Coleman was a lot faster, stole more bases, and played much better defense, so no Babe Ruth is not the same or better than Vince Coleman.”

It is unlikely that you’ll be able to get another system set up in 30 days, get the proof, submit it, and get it RainSoft to validate your claim. Heck, the claim might even sit for a few days, costing you valuable time in getting a claim for another system in.

At the end of the day, I feel like Chris Farley in Tommy Boy covered the value of this guarantee best:

So How Do You Get Clean Water?

The John Petrich the RainSoft dealer seems to think that I’m not qualified to give water purification advice. Perhaps he’s correct, because I have no background in it. Instead he suggests that we take the expert advice. I’d agree, except that the expert advice he suggests is from a salesman. In particular, he’s a salesman for one brand of water purification system and his previous comment scam attempt along with the RainSoft experience that I and numerous others have experienced.

There’s a big difference in getting car buying advice from Edmunds or Kelley Blue Book than getting advice from Larry Lemon the Used Car King. If there’s a better deal elsewhere, Larry Lemon isn’t going to tell you about it.

Instead, I suggest using a little common sense and some typical problem solving skills. Here’s how I’d, and any smart consumer, would go about solving the problem.

Reverse Osmosis System – This iSpring 5-Stage Reverse Osmosis Water Filter System gets 4.6 stars with 597 giving it glowing reviews. For $180, this looks like a huge bargain vs. the $1200 system that RainSoft offered… especially since most everyone loves it.

I may not be a water filtration expert, but combining these three systems would appear to be formidable water purification system… one that is probably overkill for 99.9% of homes. And you’d walk away with all three for under $900, plus tax. That’s less than 1/6th the cost of what RainSoft was going to charge me for the EC-4 and reverse osmosis systems.

It is worth reading the comments on Lowe’s site for the Whirlpool products. For each product, there are numerous reviews about a local company charging $5000 to $6000 for similar products and that they are very happy with these solutions.

RainSoft dealers will claim that their products are of a higher quality. They’ll say that the perform better. They’ll say that this is a comparison of a BMW to a Yugo. They’ve said all this in the comments of my previous post. The difference is that you aren’t taking a journey with the water. You don’t care about the luxury of how your water travels. You only care about results. With the water kits that I provided, you can test and ensure you are getting quality results. Still got a problem? Return it Lowe’s and/or Amazon and get something else. It certainly is worth a shot at these extremely highly rated products for under $900 than simply saying, “Okay, I’ll just shell out $6000 and finance it at 17% interest.”

My guess is that some 95% won’t need one system and 99.5% of people will be happy with these systems at a greatly reduced cost. I’m not saying that RainSoft won’t be happy with the results of their system. I’m just saying that I bet they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the two. I’m also sure most people don’t want to pay $5000 more when the job can be done at 1/6th the cost.

If RainSoft wants to give out a real Assurance Guarantee let them give out one that guarantees all contaminants will be reduced by 6 times as much as the one above for 1/6th the cost. Then we are starting to get to the point of performance per dollar spent.

But what does Consumer Expert Clark Howard have to Say?

Again, I’m not a water purification expert, but I know basic problem solving, scientific process, and consumer scams… all of which are very useful skills here. You don’t need to take my word for it though. Clark Howard is well-known for being a consumer advocate. I love his radio show and have mentioned him many times in this website in the past.

So what does Clark Howard have to say about these water filtration systems. He doesn’t say RainSoft by name, but I certainly recognized what he’s talking about on his website:

“After years of Clark’s prodding, Christa has finally made the switch from bottled water to tap water. What finally made her cross over from the dark side? She got hold of the Watersafe All-In-One Test Kit at Whole Foods. For just about $20, she was able to test her family’s tap water for bacteria, lead, pesticides, nitrates, nitrites, chlorine, pH and hardness. Well, the water passed with flying colors, and her brood has been drinking from the tap ever since.” – (Source)

See, test the water first. Maybe it’s fine and you don’t need anything. You will have saved yourself thousands and thousands of dollars before just trusting the RainSoft salesman.

“The complimentary water test the marketer was offering Christa likely would have involved a hard sell in the home. As Clark says, they practically convince you that if you love your children and want them to stay healthy, you must buy their product. ” – (Source)

This is exactly what I experienced with my RainSoft dealer. There is really no reason to have anyone visit your home. Anyone should be able to give you performance testing data of their water filtration device that you can compare. If they won’t give you that data and instead try to do some kind of in-home demonstration/magic show run, run, run away.

“So what to do if you’re afraid of tap water? Try a cheap filtration system. They’re available for your whole house, your faucet or just by the pitcher — and they all address water impurities and improve taste.” – (Source)

I mentioned the whole house system here. I figure everyone else knows about the faucet and pitcher systems. After testing with a water kit that I mentioned above, I got a faucet system and installed it in about ten minutes.

At the end of the day I’m simply stating what should be obvious by now… you don’t need some kind of water filtration expert. The kits make it very easy for you to test yourself. And stay away from a brand-specific salesman who pitches himself as an expert. He’s probably getting paid on commission to sell you that brand’s product, which might not necessarily be the best fit for your wallet/needs.

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